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Topic: How to Use Travel Mapping (Read 1949 times)

Travel Mapping is still very much in development, but we welcome users, both those who previously used CHM (the now defunct Clinched Highway Mapping project) and new users, to submit their travels for inclusion in the system.

To use the system, build a ".list" file showing the segments you've traveled on the highways we've included in the project. This process is substantially the same as it was in CHM. CHM's process is described at http://cmap.m-plex.com/docs/getstarted.php. Please refer to that until we get our own instruction manual up, but note the following changes:

Our draft highway browser, which will show the latest versions of all routes in the project, is at http://tm.teresco.org/hb/. Note that the ".list Name" column on the big list of routes gives the region and route name you'll need as the first two items on each .list file line.

If you are coming to the project from CHM, you are welcome to submit your old .list file then see what errors show up (see below for where to look) or make a preemptive pass through our updates page for changes that will affect you: http://tm.teresco.org/devel/updates.php

You can submit files by email to travmap@teresco.org or by forking our GitHub repository at https://github.com/TravelMapping/UserData, adding your file, and submitting a pull request (detailed instructions on this method to be produced - would be happy to receive some to post from one of the several users who are maintaining their files this way).

Once the first version of your .list file has been imported and the site has been updated (typically done every evening between 9 and 11 PM Eastern), you can see your information in a few ways:

Visit http://tm.teresco.org/user/ and enter your username (the base name of the .list you sent) to see a summary of your travels. Click on various places on this page to find others ways of viewing your stats (and those of other travelers) by region, by system, and more.

A log file giving any errors in the processing of your data and a summary of the stats generated will become available at http://tm.teresco.org/logs/terescoj.log, but of course you would substitute your own username at the end (the base name of the .list you sent).

You can add a u= parameter to any highway browser URL to see your travels on that route as defined by your most recently-imported .list file. For example: http://tm.teresco.org/hb/?r=ny.us020&u=terescoj shows my travels to date on US 20 in New York.

Many more maps, lists of travelers, more stats, will come over time. We currently have most of what CHM had and a lot more.

Though we've made and continue to make a lot of updates and fixes to the highway data compared to the last version from CHM, former CHM users should find that their CHM .list files are still a great starting point for mapping your travels with the new system.

I intend to keep this post current as URLs change, functionality is added, etc.